


Return to Sender

by PunkHazard



Category: Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-10
Updated: 2016-05-10
Packaged: 2018-06-07 12:06:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6803437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PunkHazard/pseuds/PunkHazard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When it rains in Aerith's church, the sun always shines.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Return to Sender

Rain doesn’t fall often on Midgar.

_> boss we retrieved one of the samples. other moving w to midgar, g’s running interference with the army_

Still, it’s– fitting. The weather often seems tuned to Aerith’s moods and Tseng used to wonder whether it was Aerith’s connection with the Planet that changed her state of mind or if she weren’t the one causing it, Gaia resonating with its last Cetra. He’d wondered once if Hojo had noted it anywhere but the man spends so little time outside that the weather was deemed inconsequential to his research. Not that Tseng would ask or bring it up; that would only invite questions with answers very much along the lines of ‘well, I might be undermining Shinra authority and ignoring standing orders’.

_> Alive?_

_> you know he’s not, sir_

_> Give him a proper burial._

Anyway. It’s raining in Midgar.

The hole Zack created in the roof of Aerith’s church remains unfixed, which Aerith has pointed out on numerous occasions to be good for the flowers, given an hour or so of unfiltered sunlight each day. Sometimes the water would flood the upper plate reservoirs and drizzle down hours later; when it rains in her church, the sun always shines. She used to stand under the skylight, face upturned, eyes closed. A sunshower, Aerith would say, and Tseng wouldn’t correct her.

She has no reason to be standing under the skylight with no sun out, the rain having subsided even in the slums, though Tseng can certainly relate to the urge.

“He’s dead,” Aerith says when he pushes open the door, voice uncharacteristically soft. She always used to say she could feel when someone she knew had finally returned to the Lifestream; street kids caught in a turf war, one or two of the Turks who used to rotate with Tseng on Cetra surveillance.  

You’re wet, he wants to say. Go home. Change your clothes so you don’t get sick. This is how it works. Zack was a SOLDIER and he became a liability and Shinra doesn’t tolerate liabilities. There’s nothing you or I can do about it, now.

“Your letters,” he says instead, extending a sealed package toward her. “I couldn’t deliver these.”

She eyes the box, at the unopened envelopes inside visible through the clear plastic cover. Aerith pulls her arms closer to herself, squeezes her eyes shut and refuses to cry. “You probably could have justified reading them,” she says, breath hitching. “You never know what Cetra secrets I was sending him.”

Hojo would have foamed at the mouth for an opportunity to read Aerith’s letters. If he found out the president might, at best, fire Tseng for keeping the information from him and at worst have him executed on the spot.

“As a Turk,” Tseng answers simply, “I should have. As his friend, I have no intention of reading his private correspondence.”

Aerith sinks to her knees, slowly as if she were floating. She doesn’t take the box and doesn’t respond when Tseng sets it down on a pew, the man himself standing quietly at a distance just out of her line of sight, as he always does. The mud in her garden stains her dress, dirty water crawling a few inches up the fabric and dyeing pink to murky red. She’s crying.

Aerith takes a shaky breath. “I,” she declares, with venom, “hate Shinra.”

She’s been saying that since she was a child and Tseng was a rookie, still in his teens. Considering all that Shinra’s taken from her, the only surprising thing about it is how rarely she expresses the sentiment nowadays.

Something warm and heavy settles over her shoulders, dark blue crowding the edges of her vision. She wants to shrug his jacket off but she’s abruptly aware of the cold, skin clammy and damp.

“Don’t let your guard down again,” Tseng tells her. He’s halfway to the exit before Aerith tugs the edges of his jacket closer, burying her nose behind the lapel to choke back her rage.

He’s already got one hand on the church door’s stately copper handle when she finally calls after him, souls of millions hissing in her ears, one above the rest. “Is that what you thought of him?” she asks, some impression of Tseng smiling at Zack’s jokes lingering in the back of her mind. The way they turned toward each other when he was on surveillance duty and Zack called out to him. The way he’d arranged and packed those letters, so carefully and meticulously, probably arranged by date. Not for her, but so Zack wouldn’t miss a thing when he’d finally get to read them. “Is that all it was to you?”

“Yes,” he says, shutting the door behind him.

 _Can you still save us?_ Aerith hears. _Maybe you shouldn’t._

Aerith finds an unopened packet of tissues in his right pocket, and a Bronze Bangle sized for her wrist in his left. She almost feels like laughing.

“That liar,” she says to her flowers, ripping the tissue packet open with her teeth and equipping the bangle. It provides minimal defense but it’s light and unobtrusive; Tseng knows that she’d never agree to wear any of the higher-grade armor Shinra makes, anyway. “He doesn’t even know what he wants.”


End file.
